Seven Keys To Productivity In The Human Cloud

Ray
Grainger is CEO and founder of Mavenlink and
technology industry veteran of over 20 years specializing
in large-scale talent acquisition and management.

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The world of work is changing. More and more business
professionals are employed as consultants, freelancers, and
sub-contractors. It’s estimated that some 42 million Americans
make their living independently, meaning they’re tied to multiple
clients rather than a single employer.

These new professionals conduct their work from the kitchen
table, café, home office, or airport boarding area. They remotely
collaborate with clients and an ever-growing network of fellow
independent providers and subcontractors. This ‘human cloud’
represents an always-on virtual workforce that’s powered by the
latest cloud-based, social networking, and mobile technologies.

But the question is: how do we enhance our productivity while
working in this human cloud? Here are seven tips designed to help
independent professionals leverage cloud-based tools to improve
the way they attract and conduct business:

Make the review process as easy as possible, for all
involved
When you’re dealing with multiple cooks in multiple kitchens,
you’ve got to give everyone a simple, convenient way to work
together, review documents or mock-ups, make comments, and check
out the project status. A collaborative, cloud-based workspace
becomes the new conference room.

Bring all your tools together
Most independent professionals rely on a mix of tools and
applications for their daily work, from email and LinkedIn to
project tracking, Google Docs (or other document sharing
program), invoicing, and more. The result is often a lot of
juggling with multiple logins, windows, and manual
reconciliation.

An end-to-end project management solution gives you integrated,
seamless access to all aspects of your projects. Choose a
flexible tool that enhances - not replaces - your favorite tools.
For example, a project management solution that supports Google
Docs will let you continue using Google Docs without requiring a
separate login or jumping between windows.

Capture all communications with the
project
By centralizing all documents, tasks, milestones, and
communications for each project in one place, you can stay
organized. You’ll no longer find yourself wading through scores
of emails to track down one particular email where a client
mentioned a new edit. And along these lines, make sure your
online platform also supports email integration, because
inevitably there will be a client or two who can’t give up email.
This means that even if clients choose to communicate via email
on their BlackBerry, these messages will be captured in your
centralized project space.

Empower your clients to answer their own
questions
Even the smallest projects can generate an enormous amount of
client questions. Any contract professional understands all too
well how much of their time gets absorbed fielding emails from
clients, such as: How’s the next draft coming along? Did Pam ever
comment on that last revision? How many hours did you spend on
the project so far?

Rather than staying with the status quo of back and forth
communications, give your clients a better way to find the
answers they need themselves. For example, an at-a-glance
dashboard shows all the key aspects of a project’s status. By
centralizing all conversations and documents you’ve got a
comprehensive audit trail for any project. Your clients can
easily find the answers they need (even at 1 am), and you can
spend less of your valuable time answering the same questions.

Support a dynamic work environment
By nature, the human cloud is very fluid. Even the solo
freelancer will inevitably need to bring contract specialists to
help from time to time. With a flexible cloud-based platform,
you’ll be able to invite as many people as you need into each
project workspace, and fine-tune the access level to match the
needs of each user. You get a centralized place for tracking all
project expenses and sub-contractor hours and everyone stays in
the loop.

Streamline your billing
Invoicing is the key to getting paid, but it’s full of
administrative busy work, and often by the time you’re ready to
invoice one project your attention is already focused on the next
project’s deadline.

There are some great point billing solutions out there but it’s
even better when you can invoice directly from inside your
project workspace. Billing from within a project workspace lets
you easily tie invoice line items to specific tasks and
milestones. This level of detail lets your clients better
understand the specific output purchase. And most importantly,
you won’t have to jump between excel spreadsheets, emails, and
billing applications to put together each invoice.

Express your brand in the cloud
Maintain your brand across the cloud by choosing flexible and
customizable solutions that let you brand your online workspace
with your logo, header, preferred colors, etc. It's important to
make clients feel comfortable by maintaining a consistent look
and feel across the web, from sharing proposals through to
billing.

Keep in mind that your time is indeed money - deploying complex
software or SaaS solution often ends up costing more time in
training clients and sub-contractors than it actually saves. Look
for a simple solution that offers just the features you need in
order to lower the learning curve and make everyone happy to use
the new technology.